Monday, February 8, 2016

Feeding Your Backyard Fowl

While by no means hard, feeding is a large turnoff for prospective chicken, duck, and goose owners. Many people find it hard to find the extra time and money to supply ample nutrients to their birds in return for a food product one can cheaply and easily pick up at the nearest grocery store. One just has to be smart about their feeding, however to make it monetarily feasible and requiring of only minutes of your day.

This point must be made first. Fowl are not picky. Chickens are perhaps the least picky domesticated animal humans keep. Their tastes range from week-old pizza to leftover soup to crabapples. They are even happy eating the flesh of their brethren! Ducks and geese, while still by no means fastidious in their food choices, are less happy with certain foods than their tasteless chicken comrades. Geese are completely vegetarian, the pickiest of the bunch. One tip to a cheaper fowl-raising experience is limit your discarding of leftover food. As mentioned before, the birds are not picky, and adore the occasional table scrap. A favorite of the birds is watermelon, especially the red meat of the fruit. Geese specialize in the rinds, using their serrated bills to tear it apart. Ducks will vacuum up the softer parts of the melon, slurping happily as they suck away at their share. Apples, or any part of them, are a fowl favorite; however, ducks, lacking a pecking or tearing apparatus on their bills, need their apples broken into bite size chunks.